Rosalind O’Hanlon’s Lineages of Brahman Power is a rich and lucidly argued collection of essays. All the individual essays, two of which have co-authors, focus on the period between 1600 C.E. and 1800 C.E., have been previously published and engage with the institutional and intellectual issues that emerged historically over questions around ‘Brahmanhood’ in and with reference to Western India. The introduction, written for the volume, argues for the salience of these themes into the colonial period.
An important thread running through the several essays is the nexus between ritual and material powers. O’Hanlon shows that debates around Brahmanhood between 1600 C.E. and 1800 C.E. intrinsically involved material power because Brahman status was often directly linked to administrative offices, judicial functions, land endowments and state patronage in general. These interconnections are revealed by the fact that important ritual cum administrative positions were occupied by Brahmans in the Sultanates of Bijapur and Bahamani while, on the other hand, Maratha Brahman families in Banaras were patronized by Rajput rulers who were part of Akbar’s court. The latter is the context for the rebuilding and patronage of the Visvesvara temple, site of some of the most important Brahman judicial assemblies of the period. Across Bahamani, Mughal and Maratha regimes, Brahmans therefore enjoyed much access to power (‘Speaking from Shiva’s Temple’, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes’ among other essays). This did not escape criticism and O’Hanlon cites the 17th century South Indian Sanskrit poet Venkatadhvari caricaturing these as materialistically inclined service occupations that signalled the forgetting of traditional learning, ritual and true duties of Brahmans (‘What Makes People Who They Are?’, p. 244).
A critical aspect of the Brahman judicial powers through their assemblies involved their rulings concerning the classification of communities as Brahmans and Kshatriyas. A fundamental reference point for these discussions in Western India was the Sahyadrikhanda. This text narrates the story of Parashurama settling Saraswat Brahmans on the Konkan coast after exterminating the Kshatriyas, and was the source for judging the relative status and ritual purity of Brahman communities. In the text, a classification of Brahmans according to region is to be found, and while distinctive regional customs are given legitimacy, they are defined by common rights to the Gayatri Mantra, rituals with Vedic mantras and the six karmas; some communities were privileged, others ‘degraded’ by origin stories that were less than flattering. The status of Brahmanhood could also be lost through many means, including illegitimate marital relations, the failure to follow rituals properly and earning from ‘degraded’ forms of livelihood involving labour. If the origins of Brahmans are one critical axis, the other is the narrative about the extermination of the Kshatriyas giving rise to the crucial problem of the basis for royalty in such a world. O’Hanlon shows the complex, dynamic and varying responses to these questions by individual Brahmans and judicial assemblies (‘What Makes People Who They Are’).
Another important thread in O’Hanlon’s collection is the importance of lineages and households that are the sites that produce and reproduce forms of knowledge such as hermeneutics, grammar and property law. That manuscript libraries grew in such spaces is not surprising considering that many family members worked on texts together, and intermarriage between such lineages was common. Brahman households were linked with ascetic orders and mathas, often headed by Brahmans; institutions which held properties, carried on commerce and negotiated with prevailing political powers (‘Brahman Lineages beyond the Mughal Court’).
Many of the essays discuss the cases on which the Brahman assemblies adjudicated; cases which involved claims and counterclaims to administrative offices as well as disputes between communities of Brahmans on questions of ritual entitlement and their material correlates. One fascinating case examined in some detail is the dispute over a (hereditary) district-accountant office involving a Brahman widow Gotmai who was legally fighting to retain the office through male kin since, as a woman, she herself could not exercise this function (‘Gotmai’s Suit’). The description of the various judicial forums as well as a dramatic public fast undertaken by Gotmai gives us a rich picture of the nature and texture of investigation, law and judicial disputes during this period. Another essay similarly undertakes a specific examination of judicial assemblies such as the majlis, involving various community representatives including state officials. These forms of public dispute resolution give way to the panchayat in the 18th century under the Peshwa state that appears less representative in O’Hanlon’s telling since panchayats were composed of members nominated by them (‘In the Presence of Witnesses’).
Judicial responses are contextualized within changing political, social-economic and technological contexts. For example, the rivalry between Brahman and Kayastha communities is traced to competition over royal patronage by communities with scribal skills and administrative training, and in Shivaji’s own time it was stated that both be given key positions as checks on one another. Prior to Shivaji, O’Hanlon contends there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a specific Brahman ritual consecration of rulers in Western India, and Gagabhatta from Banaras is called in the face of resistance to the idea from local Brahmans for whom the kali yuga was bereft of Kshatriyas. This question of the role of Brahmans in the kali yuga is a central one around which Brahman scholarship and judicial power pivot themselves over the centuries. One discursive context can be found in the history of critical responses of Maratha Brahmans like Krishna Sesa (16th c.) and Kamalakarabhatta (17th c.) to Gopinatha’s Jativiveka (circa 14th/15th c.). The Jativiveka, a key scholarly reference point until the 19th century and consulted in various disputes across centuries into the colonial period, defended the varnashrama dharma, was hostile to varnasamskara and Bhakti, and traced Kayasthas to a degraded pratiloma intermarriage. While both Krishna Sesa and Kamalakarabhatta widened the range of communities to which the ‘good’ Sudra status applied, Kamalakarabhatta also defended the survival of Kshatriyas and Vaishyas in the kali yuga, and spoke of the existence of a non-degraded community of Kayasthas traced to King Chandrasena and entitled to a Vedic thread ceremony. O’Hanlon contends that the argument of the survival of Kshatriyas is to be related to the fact that the Maratha Brahmans of Banaras were patronized by Rajput rulers of the Mughal Court looking for forms of legitimacy. On the other hand, many Bakhars by Kayasthas promoted their own distinctive contribution to the Maratha State in the context of the discussion over the social and (‘inferior’) ritual entitlements of Sudras; an issue whose intensity only seemed to arise with the ascendance of the Chitpavan Brahman dominated Peshwa State (‘Discourses of Caste over the Long Duree’ among other essays).
The Peshwa State is analysed across several essays, with one devoted to the employment of Maratha Brahman diplomats (‘vakils’) in their regime as well as other ‘regional’ States, including Hyder Ali and the Nizam, demonstrating on another register the importance of Brahmans in the political-administrative worlds of the 18th century; an inroad into the evolving protocols of diplomacy is thereby also made (‘Entrepreneurs in Diplomacy’). The accentuation of state involvement in the enforcement of principles of varnasharama dharma and concomitant controls and discrimination on the registers of caste and gender both in public and in the household is illustrated through an analysis of an 18th century official document, where detailed instructions regarding washing, cooking, eating, dressing, and social relations are to be found (‘Disciplining the Brahman Household’). On the other hand, O’Hanlon writes of attempts by the Peshwas to destroy ‘manuscripts on which subversive puranic stories about the Chitpavans were based’ and execute those possessing them (‘Performance in a World of Paper’, p. 380).
This collection puts to rest arguments about ‘fuzzy’ pre-modern communities floating free of the state as well as those which attribute to merely a modern-western-colonial imposition the violent epistemic and political-state effects of caste. As O’Hanlon argues, ‘the largest 17th century gathering of named Brahman scholars that we know of assembled together not in intellectual debate but to assure themselves of the purity of marriage relations’
(p. 204). In terms of the ‘public’, on the other hand, ‘most works of vastusastra prescribed a location for different professions and varnas within towns and cities’ (p. 335).
How is one to understand caste violence without the coercive and punitive regulation of gender and community, spatially and otherwise? O’Hanlon’s strength lies in her rich detailing of intellectual and institutional questions in the period she studies, but she is on less firm ground when she speculates on the implications of her work beyond this domain. Such instances include suggestions about the ‘pre-figuring’ of the non-Brahman movement’s critique by this earlier period (‘The Social Worth of Scribes’, p. 303) and the relationship between caste and Hindu Kingship (where she supports R Inden’s argument for an earlier period, even while she simply notes, without describing or engaging, S Jaiswal’s important critique of Inden; ‘Discourses of Caste Over the Long Duree’, pp. 341-2). While the Brahmanical normative is insightfully measured in terms of its material prowess, more explicit reflection on categories such as ‘state’, ‘property’, ‘religion’ and ‘public’ in the wake of the demonstrated inter-relations between ritual, revenue, judicial and administrative rights would have been welcome. This volume is, all the same, a fine skein of scholarship that greatly deepens our understanding of ‘early modern’ India.
Rahul Govind is with the Department of History, University of Delhi, Delhi.